“Human Chef” to “Computer Chef”: Culinary Interactions Framework for Understanding HCI in the Food Industry

Food is important and pertinent to everyone in more ways than one with its physical, social, mental, and cultural implications. The significance and interest in food and food-related activities are growing, and along with this movement there is a surge of human-computer interaction technologies in the food industry, also known as human-food interaction (HFI). There is a need to make sense of this burgeoning field, especially in a structured means to comprehend and analyze these technologies. The primary purpose of this paper is to introduce Culinary Interactions Framework, which provides a way of positioning and evaluating each HFI product and service in the food subsystem that focuses on the culinary processes, helps understand the HFI technology landscape, and identifies more nuanced points of interactions between human and robot. We also present ideas for future works to develop this framework further, with respect to more sophisticated levels of autonomy, expansion to other food subsystems beyond the culinary processes, and exploration of latent needs around HFI. The framework and further discussions are intended to better articulate, evaluate, and inform design and developments in HFI.